Mountain Goats Collect Early '90s Cassettes on New Compilation

Having just announced a North American tour that includes a Vancouver stop on June 22, John Darnielle is hardly resting on the laurels of his long-running Mountain Goats project. With a career that's constantly moving forward, however, there's still room to look back, as Darnielle will prove with the reissue of two cassette-only Mountain Goats releases from the early '90s.

The albums include 1992's The Hound Chronicles and 1993's Hot Garden Stomp. Combined, the releases include 30 original compositions, along with covers of Hank Williams's "Keep It on Your Mind" and Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Tell Me on a Sunday." Now Shrimper Records, which originally released both tapes, will collect both on one CD reissue, set to arrive June 26.

While we know the tapes' original release dates, in the liner notes of the reissue, Darnielle insists that their time of release is unimportant:

These tapes did not have release dates. No one anticipated their coming into the world, and very few noticed or cared. All previous eras cross at some point into the territory of the unimaginable, and so it is with the days of tape-trading. The obscurity in which these songs were incubated and born and brought into their faint light is a state of being which has passed into history.

The new tracklisting for Hound Chronicles / Hot Garden Stomp is available below.